indulgence. Admittedly, as Howard said, we are all performers, self-made actors on the social stage; all role is self-or other-assigned; yet, for a man who believed that reality didn't exist yet, he had to admit he found Leeds more real. The Kirks, staring at Watermouth in the indulgent sunshine, discovered they did not know how to place themselves, house themselves. They drove around in the hilly inland behind the town, in Henry's little 4L Renault, looking at what Henry termed 'properties'. There were a lot of properties. Myra and Barbara sat in the back, the baby between them, a tight squeeze; friend to friend, they explored and analysed in high detail the latter-day ebb and flow of Kirk marital history. In the front seat, Howard sat next to Henry, peering through the windscreen, the visor down, an estate agents' map on his knee, noting with Northern radical scepticism the exotic social mixes through which they passed. From time to time, feeling the need to counter-balance the prejudiced narrative recorded in the back, he talked, victoriously, to Henry, in the sunlight, of his well-liked book, of the reviews, of the new commission and large advance the publisher had given him. Now and then Henry stopped the car, and they got out, and solemnly examined a property. Henry's taste in property had been transformed, become rural and bourgeois; he praised, mysteriously, 'advantages' like paddocks and stables. The Kirks stood and stared, peering through trees at hills. Never having encountered a property before, they had no idea how to behave in the presence of one; they knew their radical desires were being subtly threatened and impaired, even though Henry told them what was true, that they had more money now, that a mortgage was a good investment for the advance, that the time in their lives, with a second baby, was here when they should settle down. But down was not where they wanted to settle; a hideous deceit seemed to be being practised; Henry, having already destroyed himself, was seeking to inculpate them too. 'A property is theft,' Howard kept on saying, looking around at the endless wastes of unpopulated, orderly countryside that surrounded them, depressed them with its frightening timelessness, its unlocated look, its frank detachment from the places where history was happening, the world was going onward and on.
After two days of this, when Henry was about to take them into yet another estate agency in yet another commuterized small town, somewhere in the hinterland of Watermouth, its windows filled with announcements about retirement bungalows, Howard felt the need to speak true. 'Look, Henry,' he said, 'you're trying to impose some false image on us, aren't you? We're not like this, Barbara and me, remember?'
'It's a very sound residential area,' said Henry, 'you'd keep your resale value.'
'We'd go off our heads in one of these places,' said Howard, 'we couldn't live with these people, we couldn't live with ourselves.'
'I thought you wanted something nice,' said Henry. 'No, for Christ's sake, nothing nice,' said Howard, 'I don't come from anywhere like this. I don't accept its existence politically. You don't either, Henry. I don't know what you're doing here.' Henry stared at Howard with a slightly shamefaced, slightly baffled look. 'There comes a time,' he said, 'there comes a time when you realize, Howard. You might want change, well, we all want change. But there is an inheritance of worthwhile life in this country, Howard. We all come to need a place where you can get down deeper into yourself and into, well, the real rhythms of living. That's what Myra and I are into now, Howard.'
'Here?' asked Howard. 'There's nothing here. You stop fighting.'
'Well, fighting,' said Henry, staring at little photographs of houses in the window, 'I'll do my bit for betterment. But I'm divided. I'm not wild about all this violent radical zeal that's about now, all these explosive bursts of demand. They taste of a fashion. Punch a policeman this year. And I can't see what's wrong with a bit of separateness and withdrawal from the fray.'
'No?' asked Howard. 'That's because you're bourgeois now, Henry. You have the spirit of a bourgeois.'
'No, I don't,' said Henry, 'that's nasty. I'm trying to give my life a little dignity without robbing anyone else of theirs. I'm trying to define an intelligent, liveable, unharming culture, Howard.'
'Oh, Christ,' said Howard, 'evasive quietism.'
'You know, Henry, I'm sorry,' said Barbara, 'but if I lived like you, I'd die first.'
'Bourgeois, bourgeois,' said Howard the next day as, their things packed, the baby in the back of the van, they drove off from the farmhouse after an uncomfortable parting. 'Well,' said Barbara, trying to be kind to the kind, the people who had saved her when she was wandering loose with a television set, 'don't forget, they haven't had all our disadvantages.'
They drove, over bridges, through chines, towards the town and the sea; they were escaping, back into Watermouth to get the feel of urban life again, to consort once more with staple reality. There were houses and dustbins and rubbish and crime. In the end, Howard resolved to visit the Social Security department in Watermouth; he needed to set his spirit right, to reassure himself that the place in which he was planting his destiny really did have a sociology-had social tensions, twilight areas, race issues, class-struggle, battles between council and community, alienated sectors, the stuff, in short, of true living. Leaving the van in the car park, with Barbara and the baby inside, he penetrated into the bleak 'offices, and was granted a stroke of luck. For here was working one of his own former students from Leeds, a girl called Ella, who wore granny spectacles, and denim jeans and top, and knew his radical temper, and, like any good student, shared it. An adult girl, Howard said to Barbara later, after she had left her desk in the office and got into the minivan with them, crouching in the back, next to the baby's basket, promising to show them the real Watermouth. She hunted out the areas of deprivation hidden between and behind the old private hotels, the new holiday flatlets; she probed the unexpected social mixes tucked behind the funfair and the holiday facade of the town; she showed them the acres of urban blight, the concrete of urban renewal. 'Of course it's a problem town,' said Ella. 'Oh, they'd like to pretend it isn't, that might discourage the tourists. But anywhere that brings in people for the holiday trade in the summer and then dumps them on unemployment pay in the winter is going to have problems, and they've got them.'
'Any radicals?' asked Barbara. 'Plenty,' said Ella. 'It's full of hippies and dropouts. All these places are. It's a town you can run to and disappear. There are empty houses. Visitors are soft touches. Lots of marginal work. No, it's a good place.' She gave some directions and brought them into the slum clearance area. 'Of course nobody wants to see this, but here's what they ought to rub their tourists' faces in,' she said, pushing her way into an empty old house where meths drinkers, drunks, addicts and runaways came, she said, to spend the night. You could see they did; the Kirks penetrated through the back door into the chaotic brokenness of the house; its stair-rails were snapped, and there was excrement in the corners, litter on the floor, bottles smashed in the bedroom, gaping holes where the glass had been knocked out from windows. Barbara stood in the bleak spaces, holding the baby on her shoulder; Howard wandered around. He said: 'We could get some permanent squatters into this.'
'Why not?' asked Ella, 'this one's going to be around for a long while yet. They've not got the cash to pull it down.' Barbara, sitting down on the bottom stair with the baby, said: 'Of course we could squat in it ourselves.'
'Well, we could,' said Howard. 'Maybe this sounds immoral,' said Ella, 'but you could even do it legally. I think I could fix it for you. I know all the people in the council to talk to.'
'It's a good scene,' said Barbara. 'You couldn't really call it a property,' said Howard.
So Ella and the Kirks walked out, through the broken back door; they stood and inspected the remnants of the curved terrace in which the house stood; they looked across to the castle and down toward the promenade. It was the debris of a good address. They drove back to the council offices, and Howard talked to people, and said he was going in there anyway, and he made an arrangement to rent the property, for a very small sum, promising to be out when it was all to be torn down, which would not be until two years' time. And so the Kirks ended up with an unpropertylike property after all. So, in that autumn, they rented a Willhire van. Howard drove the van, and Barbara tailed him in the minivan, and they moved all their stuff south and west down to Watermouth. When they came to load the van with their things, it was a surprise and mystery to them to see the amount of it; they believed they had almost no possessions, being free-floating people. But there was the cooker, the stereo system, the television set (for by now they had bought one), the blender, the wickerwork rocking chair, the Habitat crockery, the toys, the two filing cabinets and the door that Howard laid across them in order to construct his desk, the many books that he found he had accumulated, the papers in their files, the index cards, the Holorith system, the demographic graphs and charts that came from Howard's office at the university, the table-lamps, the rugs, the typewriter the boxes of notes.
They had an official key to the house in the curved terrace; they turned off the main road, parked in front of the terrace, opened the house, and unloaded. It all made a modest presence in the decrepitly fine rooms, with their filth and chaos. They spent three days just cleaning out. Then came the business of tidying, mending, reconstructing, a terrifying task; the house was badly damaged. But Howard now revealed a certain talent for fixing
